Ferrucio Busoni’s Doktor Faust was left unfinished at the composer’s death in 1924 and completed by Philip Janarch. Further sketches for the work by the composer were fleshed out and incorporated into the score by Anthony Beaumont in 1982. That more complete version was performed at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 2023 and recorded for video.
Fidelio is an interesting piece. The music is great and it has a powerful, very straightforward, plot. There are no convoluted subplots here. But there is a lot of spoken dialogue which slows things down. Is it necessary? Claus Guth doesn’t think so and in his 2015 Salzburg production he replaces the dialogue with ambient noise and also doubles up Leonora and Don Pizarro with silent actor “shadows”; the former using sign language in the manner of the narrator character in Guth’s Messiah. It works remarkably well. The ambient noise sections are quite disturbing and the “shadows” add some depth, especially the frantic signing in the final scene. Perhaps worth noting that the “noise” contains a lot of very low bass and precise spatial location. It may need a pretty good sound system to have the intended effect.
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